DRf>..T! SOME-ONE- STOLE. f'J\'( B\ KE I, ..; . .:. .: . o , O ., j ,. noon".. Q ';', ,.< ,"" ,', ' "0." n",>> K 'iIe. .' ,> JiNif., .A"",.", ,.. "'''' . ",. . - - . ... . _ n . or eighty million-a little more than hili the current population. And none of these figures allow for the impact of AlDS, which remains, in many ways, un- recognized and unreckoned with. The World Bank has estimated that by 2020 at least five million people will be in- fected with H.I. V.; a more pessimistic, but equally plausible, figure is fourteen million. Even without AlDS as a factor, working-age people are starting to dis- appear. (In the United States, fifteen per cent of men die before they retire; in Russia, nearly fifty per cent die.) By 2015, the number of children under the age of fifteen will have fallen by a quarter. There will be at least five million fewer people in the workforce. The Russian Ministry of Education projects a thirty- per-cent drop in school enrollment. Rus- sian women already bear scarcely more than haJf the number of children needed to maIntain the current population, and the situation will soon get worse. Be- tween 2010 and 2025, the number of women between twenty and twenty- nine-the primary childbearing years- WIll plummet from eleven and a half million to six million. Unless there is sudden new immigration on a gigantic scale, fertility will fall even from today's anemic level. A serious AlDS epidemic promises to compound each of these problems im- mensely: of all H.I. V. infections regis- 60 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 11, 2004 n .......^ _....? ':1((>" :;, . }. .'\or_ -' . tered in Russia, ninety-nine per cent have been reported in the past five years, and sixty-five per cent in the past three years. Just at the time when the country will begin to reel under the burden of its shrinking labor force and an increasingly disabled population, it will have to find a way to cope with millions of AIDS pa- tients, too. The Russian government has re- corded two hundred and ninety-two thousand people with H.I. V, but doctors and AlDS workers estimate that there are at least seven hundred and fifty thou- sand. Most epidemiologists, including those from the United Nations AlDS Program and the World Health Organi- zation, believe that there may well be twice that number. Russiàs spotty sys- tem of medical accounting makes it im- possible to kno People can be treated only in cities where they are "registered" as residents. Official statistics are based on cases-whoever walks through the clinic door. Yet millions of people live il- legally in places where they cannot regis- ter-in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other big cities-and so they are not counted and therefore cannot be helped. "You can tell a politician that this country is going to vanish in twenty years if we don't start dealing with the AIDS epidemic now, but they don't lis- ten," Vadim Pokrovsky told me. Pok- rovsky is in charge of the Russian Fed- eral AlDS Center, in Moscow, and for two decades he has been the public face of Russia's efforts to curtail the epi- demic. "They only pay attention when people are dropping dead in the streets. That is going to happen. We can no longer pretend it won't. It's just a matter now of how many will die." So far, that message has not sunk in. No senior Kremlin official was willing to discuss AlDS policies with me, because, as one explained, "we don't have an AIDS policy to discuss. There is no plan, no goals, nothing. It's not even on our radar." For most of its history; Russia has de- fined itself physically: as the biggest country on earth and as the place where Europe and Asia come together. Today; however, a nation's significance is deter- mined more by people than by land. Twenty-five years ago, the population of Russia was a hundred and forty million, and that of its neighbor Pakistan was eighty million. Within twenty years, that ratio will have reversed itself If United Nations projections hold true, even Yemen will soon have more people than Russia. The prevailing view; initially; was that Russia's sharp decline would be brief--a reflection of the chaos and un- certainty confronted in the nineteen- nineties by a new and deeply troubled socie But the trend actually began de- cades ago. In an era of antibiotics, molec- ular medicine, and universal literacy, the life of the average Russian man is ahnost six years shorter today than it was in 1965. Just fifteen years ago, the Soviet Union's status as a superpower was un- questioned; today; the country is so weak that it is hard to see how it could ever re- gain that status. Russiàs desperation seems to be driv- ing the country in exactly the opposite direction. Last month, in the southern town of Beslan, Chechen separatists killed hundreds of children they had taken hostage at a school. Federal troops were given so little support during the siege that they had to borrow bullets from local civilians. The nation responded with shock, but President Vladimir Putin re- sponded cynically: he seized greater power for himself More than military or political power, however, more than guns, revolutions, or monarchic decrees, demography is what has often shaped the relationships be- tween countries. It was, after all, an un-